OpenBSD 3.9 Adds Sensor Framework

wbglinks writes to tell us ZDNet is reporting that the newest version of OpenBSD will include a sensor framework to help system administrators keep tabs on the environmental conditions of their servers. From the article: "At present, there are a number of commercial products that allow the environmental conditions of servers to be monitored, but different brands of server require different products. For example, Dell PowerEdge servers use the Embedded Server Management tool, while Sun Fire Servers use Sun's Remote System Control. This can make server management tricky when running a heterogeneous architecture. OpenBSD 3.9, which is scheduled for release on 1 May, includes support for the sensors and the sensor management tools used on a number of architectures."

Comments

Re:Should it be in?

[thomasweber]

Ehm, in that part of the interview he's talking about "randomised memory allocation", not about sensors.

Re:Should it be in?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you RTFA, you can see that that quotation was taken out of context. Theo was discussing fully random memory allocation to prevent buffer overflow. As far as I know, sensor monitoring is available quite easily in Linux.

Re:Should it be in?

[bensch128]

There's lots of niche features which are in the main branch of the kernel.

NUMA, OMAP, powerPC, and the list goes on and on.

However, I think it would be VERY cool to be able to query /dev/tempsensor1 for the tempature of my motherboard or CPU. Might even be able to do something useful with it.

Cheers,
Ben

Welcome to....

[diegocgteleline.es]

"There is a significant new sensor framework [in OpenBSD 3.9], which supports voltage sensors, fan sensors, temperature sensors, and so on," said de Raadt. "Such a feature is still missing in Linux and other major operating systems."

There we go

Re:Welcome to....

[Triumph The Insult C]

this sensor framework is integrated into the base install. it is managed and developed by the openbsd developers, not a third party group where changes still have to get imported

the framework supports a lot of sensors. along with sensorsd(9), it is a large improvement over what has been available for other OSes

Re:What about ACPI?

[ThePhilips]

IIRC Intel's ACPI code was included in Kernel long time ago. It's just ACPI has nothing to do with sensors. (http://acpi.sourceforge.net/)

Sensors it's LM78 project. But. Not on single Linux instalation I've had luck with sensor installation. )-: Most of the time lm78 reported me nothing - given it found any sensors at all...

P.S. Overall, due to separate development of kernel and libc, Linux development rarely results in any kind of API or framework. (Well, except the even rarer case when both developers - libc & kernel ones - happen to be employed by Red Hat.)

Re:File cabinets and fires

[QuietLagoon]

Sensor management means that you can never be completely away from your cellphone.

Sensor management means that you will be aware of problems as they are in the nascent stages of development, before they become a crisis. It provides you the time needed to research and repair, instead of the panicked "fix it now!" when systems stop working.

Re:About time

[MikeBabcock]

Being all-powerful, I'm sure Jesus would be pretty good at tap dancing if he felt like it :-)

That said, although 'lm_sensors' and such can be a royal pain to manage at a low level when starting out, many higher-level tools exist to manage entire networks of Linux machines and their status data.

See the related apps page on the rrdtool homepage.

Re:Should it be in?

[SigILL]

$ uname -srm
OpenBSD 3.6 i386
$ sysctl -a hw.sensors
hw.sensors.0=viaenv0, TSENS1, temp, 24.30 degC / 75.74 degF
hw.sensors.1=viaenv0, TSENS2, temp, 61.40 degC / 142.52 degF
hw.sensors.2=viaenv0, TSENS3, temp, 5.10 degC / 41.18 degF
hw.sensors.3=viaenv0, FAN1, fanrpm, 0 RPM
hw.sensors.4=viaenv0, FAN2, fanrpm, 0 RPM
hw.sensors.5=viaenv0, VSENS1, volts_dc, 2.52 V
hw.sensors.6=viaenv0, VSENS2, volts_dc, 2.43 V
hw.sensors.7=viaenv0, Vcore, volts_dc, 1.98 V
hw.sensors.8=viaenv0, VSENS3, volts_dc, 5.47 V
hw.sensors.9=viaenv0, VSENS4, volts_dc, 12.72 V

The idea here is that it's all nicely integrated. On more recent OpenBSD releases you can use sensorsd(8) to monitor the hardware through this very same interface. No kernel patching required (and probably not even kernel compiling; GENERIC has most stable stuff enabled already), and no need to figure out which interface to use.

The new thing with 3.9 is support for more hardware monitoring interfaces, notably IPMI.

That's on my Epia VE5000 box btw, no need to fret about the 0 RPM fans :)